Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The abused woman’s voice had dropped to a scant whisper, and now, as every fiber of her delicate body quivered, it ceased altogether: and Thérèse, hugging her close, and paying no heed to her blood-soaked garment, now began herself to sob, with childlike abandon.

  Some minutes passed thusly, with no word spoken, and no sound in the room save that of the sisters’ weeping: whereupon another of Mr. Wick’s officers entered the room, and, waking, as it were, to the men’s presence, Perdita began again to rave, and to pitch herself about, begging Thérèse not to allow them near the bed,—nay, not to allow them in the room. “Profane,—hideous,—mocking,—unspeakable!—his touch!—their touch!—it must not happen again,—Perdita shall die,—no man must come near,—O Thérèse, do not let them touch me,—do not let them fondle and despoil me,—never, never, never—”

  At last Dr. Hatch arrived; and was ushered upstairs; and with hesitation approached his patient, as if fearing the extremity of her distress. Her wild eye alighting upon him, Perdita drew back her lips from her moist white teeth, and made, involuntarily, a hissing sound: whereupon the tearful Thérèse again embraced her tight, and explained to her, that it was only Dr. Hatch,—her physician—Dr. Hatch whom she knew well, and whom she had no reason to fear. But Perdita whispered, “No, no,—none of them shall touch me again,—I am raw and bleeding from their cruelty, Thérèse!—pray do not let them touch me ever again!”

  Following an intense exchange of whispers amongst Thérèse, Dr. Hatch, and the greatly agitated Orrin Wick (who had, all unaccountably, flushed a bright crimson in being privy to so frank and unabashèd a scene), it was determined that the stricken woman must not be roused to further hysteria. So it was, Dr. Hatch handed a vial of ammonia to Thérèse, who held it beneath her sister’s flared nostrils: with the result that she blinked, and swallowed hard, and, the while tears streaked her pallid cheeks, regained some semblance of calm. At this, she would not allow the agèd physician to draw near her bed, for, as she said, she could not abide being touched: and would as readily surrender her life as suffer the indignity of an examination. And, shrinking in womanly modesty, as she became ever more conscious of her surroundings, she begged Thérèse, to beg the police officers to leave the room.

  With a gallantry that did him credit, Orrin Wick obeyed this command straightaway, for he could see what the situation was,—knew what it was his task to accomplish, that Justice might be dealt out to the brute who had so abused Mrs. Bunting. “It may be that we are arrived too late, to aid certain persons,” Mr. Wick said in a forceful voice, “but we are not too late to aid you, Mrs. Bunting. Pray do not lose patience with us!”

  Once the door was closed, Thérèse again appealed to her sister, that she allow Dr. Hatch to make, at least, a cursory examination: for, under the law, a medical report was required: and Dr. Hatch was obliged to act. But Perdita would not hear of it; despite her condition, she was as wondrously stubborn as ever. “Nay, sister, nay,—it cannot—it will not be,” she said in a hoarse voice, “for, as I have said, I am raw and bleeding from one brute, and cannot tolerate the touch of another.”

  It is a measure of Dr. Hatch’s distress upon that terrible day, that he did not take offense at these intemperate words: for, it seems, he had allowed himself a glimpse into Reverend Bunting’s study,—a glimpse, and no more—and had been quite shaken by the sight. (Advanced now in years, Dr. Hatch had come to think it was the wisest procedure not to interfere overmuch, where interference was unwanted.)

  So it was, he turned gallantly aside from his weeping patient, and fixed his gaze to a neutral corner of the room; while, in haste, Thérèse fashioned a curtain of sorts about the bed, that Perdita, with her aid, might remove her bloodstained garment; and slip on a dressing gown of beige silk. Dr. Hatch then cleared his throat, and asked one or two questions, precisely as to how Perdita had been abused; and what injuries she had suffered. “Has there been much bleeding, my dear? And has it stopped? And is there great pain?” he inquired, a writing pad on his knee, and a pencil in his trembling fingers. Perdita cupped her hands to Thérèse’s ear, to whisper a reply: whereupon the blushing Thérèse leaned to Dr. Hatch, to whisper this information to him. “Ah, indeed!—ah, dear me, indeed!” the snowy-haired gentleman exclaimed, his own cheeks grown ruddy, and his rheumy eyes aglow with indignation. In a shaking hand he transcribed these particulars, so far as he was capable; declared that the examination was concluded; and that the most soothing remedy for Mrs. Bunting’s distress, at the present time, was a liberal dosage of laudanum,—“the very medicine, my child, for sleep and forgetting.”

  For which kindness Perdita profusely thanked him, with tear-streaked cheeks; and murmured lowly, “God bless you, Dr. Hatch.”

  YET THIS DAY of unparalleled surprises was not even now concluded: for, just as the remains of the victims were about to be removed to the mortuary van, and the manhunt for Jabez Dovekie was already under way, there arrived at the rectory, in a hackney cab, a fashionably dressed gentleman in amber-tinted glasses, who said it was imperative that he speak with Chief of Police Orrin Wick at once.

  This goateed stranger, of but slender build, and moderate height, gave the impression of being considerably taller,—nay, of being most aristocratic and assured—by dint of his posture; and his bearing; and his tastefully elegant clothes: a navy blue suit in tropical wool, of the finest texture, with a double-breasted coat; a white shirt of narrow pleats with a smart wing collar, and a silken “ancient madder” necktie; and a handsome hat of Panama styling, in autumnal hue. His gloves were of a very pale powder gray; and, as he courteously removed his hat, one saw the flash of lapis lazuli cuff links.

  His card he handed straightaway to the amazed Orrin Wick,—

  XAVIER R. KILGARVAN

  CONSULTING DETECTIVE

  NEW YORK CITY

  “I make my circumstance”

  —Emerson

  —while, unabashèdly, he proceeded to remove the disguise in which he had traveled: taking off the metal-rimmed amber glasses, and the altogether convincing goatee, and matching wig (of dull-red wavy hair, subtly tinged with gray); and wiping from his cheeks and throat a ruddy species of face powder, which had given him, upon entry into the bright-lit foyer, an air of almost insolent health and well-being.

  Ah, it was Mr. Xavier Kilgarvan!—albeit somewhat agèd, about the eyes in particular; and possessed of a masklike imperturbability, or an inordinately refined graciousness, which had not always been his. To put the provincial chief of police more at his ease, Xavier Kilgarvan said, in a voice low enough so that it might not be overheard by persons milling about, that he had come to Winterthurn City for reasons he could not disclose, as he did not entirely understand them himself: but it was his presumption he had been summoned hither, by an unknown person, to contend with the mystery at hand. He knew, by now, of the bare facts of the murders of Reverend Harmon Bunting and his mother, Mrs. Letitia Bunting, and of his parishioner Mrs. Amanda Poindexter,—he knew, in a most confused way, that Reverend Bunting’s wife had been somehow “abused”: and wanted only to proffer aid to the police in seeking out the criminal or criminals. “Please understand, Mr. Wick,” Xavier Kilgarvan said, in a discreet voice, while fixing the elder gentleman with the semblance of a smile, “I have come only to assist you and your detectives, if you so wish, for no fee whatsoever; and I give my word as a gentleman, I shall not agitate to ‘take over’ the investigation, save at your request.”

  It was an awkward minute or so before Orrin Wick, flush-faced, and staring, yet, at this apparition,—whom, now, he halfway fancied he did recognize, the goatee being stripped away—sufficiently collected his thoughts to shake the hand of the renowned Mr. Kilgarvan; and to welcome him to Winterthurn City, after so many years; and, with somewhat less enthusiasm, to the “mystery at hand.” For, as Mr. Kilgarvan would learn shortly, there would be little formal investigation required, the identity of the murderer being already known; and only his present whereabouts a questio
n. So it was,—this, remarked with a veritable air of apology!—no mystery accrued to the situation at all: while dreadful enough, and, indeed, unparalleled in its savagery, the case was an open-and-shut one, in which the expertise of a detective of Xavier Kilgarvan’s caliber was assuredly not needed.

  Hearing these words; yet, by some subtle intimation of his smile, indicating that he did not exactly credit them, Xavier Kilgarvan fixed Winterthurn’s chief of police with a level, gray, stony gaze, of a just perceptibly ironic nature, and murmured: “That remains to be seen,—that is yet to be determined. For, Mr. Wick, as you must know,—as our mutual boyhoods in Winterthurn have instructed us—there is invariably Mystery: and not least, where acts of murder are concerned.”

  Lapis Lazuli

  It is, I think, a proven fact of the human psyche, that while Mystery, satisfactorily solved, yields immense pleasure (to the degree, perhaps, to which it has appeared intractable), that Mystery which cannot be solved, which defiantly resists all analysis, yields immense displeasure,—nay, an actual sensation of physical sickness, and dread,—a vertigo of the soul. For, as the one confirms our hazardous faith in Man’s pride, in both controlling destiny and comprehending its innermost secret, the other, all monstrously, denies our instinct for logic, and order, and justice, and sanity, and, indeed, civilization itself,—without which, we should soon find brute existence intolerable.

  Thus it was, despite the air of impenetrable equanimity with which Xavier Kilgarvan returned to the city of his birth, and the much-admired coolness with which,—ah, how unhesitatingly!—he proceeded to examine, in detail, the bloody scene of the crime, he could not fail to shake off the oppressive sense of uneasiness, mounting to dread, which commonly stirred in him at the mere thought,—the mere recollection—of Winterthurn: Winterthurn being that region (in the detective’s imagination at least) that could not be comprehended, or “solved”—!

  The place of my birth, Xavier Kilgarvan oft brooded, and of my damnation.

  Virtually anywhere else, it seemed, his enviable powers of ratiocination, detection, and intuition rarely failed him; but when his thoughts shifted to Winterthurn, and to his impotence and failure there, Xavier Kilgarvan felt, for all that he had acquired Fame and Fortune in the world, helpless as a young child. So far as Winterthurn was concerned, the common laws of Nature were suspended: that which might yield to a systematic attack elsewhere, was obdurate here: the detective might as fruitfully exercise his mental prowess by beating his head against a stone wall as by trying to “understand”—! For Xavier Kilgarvan had been too cruelly wounded, by the losses of his brother, and his mother, and his secret belovèd Perdita, to muse philosophically upon Winterthurn’s vagaries, in the style, for instance, of Angus Peregrine: who, when the men happened upon each other in Manhattan, liked nothing better than to dwell upon his professional humiliation there,—his “public triumph and his private defeat,” as the ebullient criminal lawyer phrased it.

  Ah, the bitter mysteries of Winterthurn!—to be brooded upon by night, as one prods an aching tooth, or caresses, all surreptitiously and guiltily, a sore festered past healing! Oft-times, rendered insomniac by memories, Xavier Kilgarvan would lie sleepless in his bachelor’s bed, on the third floor of his handsome Washington Square townhouse, turning over and over in his mind, helpless, and enraged, and baffled, and, it truly seemed, damn’d, those puzzles he could never hope to solve. What had happened to the good-hearted Colin to transform him, by degrees, into a monster,—a monster in the unquestioning service of a monster; what had happened to the surpassingly generous, and kindly, and loving Mrs. Kilgarvan, she who had, through all Xavier’s young life, so unstintingly adored him; and, not least, what had happened to lead Perdita in the direction she had, seemingly of her own volition, chosen: defying not only Xavier’s love for her but her avowed love for him? It cannot be grasped, any of it, the tortured man bethought himself, staring into the dark. Therefore I should content myself, for the remainder of my life, with only those mysteries within my ken.

  Yet how they plagued him!—how they haunted him! Those unsolved,—indeed, insoluble—mysteries: and, beyond them, a greater mystery, as to how God could allow such transgressions in His world! For it was certainly the case,—as the sympathetic reader, I think, will agree—that even when Xavier had succeeded in ascertaining the truth, some incalculable malevolence prevented Justice from being served: the innocent Isaac Rosenwald treated most grievously, the guilty Valentine Westergaard set free: and Winterthurn City proceeding, withal, as if naught were amiss. (At the time of this narrative, in fact, “Isaac Rosenwald” drew blank stares when mentioned, as Xavier discovered within a few days of returning: even so thoughtful a personage as Murre Pitt-Davies had simply forgotten his existence. As for Valentine Westergaard,—he had had the grace not to return to Winterthurn after the accidental death of his heiress wife Valeria, a few years following their marriage, but had “settled in,” as one of his relatives said, in the exotic city of Tangier, to devote himself to music, poetry, and love of God.)

  Yet it could not be denied that, with the passage of years, the only mysteries that truly engaged Xavier’s imagination were those quite clearly insoluble: in truth, of a resolutely personal, and even childlike, nature,—Why had he been banished from all human happiness?

  SIPPING SHERRY as he oft-times did, or, as soon as dusk snugly fell, rewarding himself (for thus he phrased it) with a generous glass of Scotch, Xavier did not, of course, so much assuage his high-strung nerves as deaden them. Upon numerous occasions he fell to musing over certain lectures delivered by Professor William James, which he had been privileged to hear, as a Harvard undergraduate, and he recalled the subject of the mystery of personality, and of religious experience, which had greatly intrigued him; and of which the distinguished psychologist spoke with immense edification and wit. There was, for instance, that enviable specimen of humanity, the healthy-minded individual; there was the morbid-minded; and the divided; and the second-born, or converted; and, not least, the mystic. There were those so utterly swallowed up in God, they might be said to inhabit sheer joy, not in themselves but in God; there were those mysteriously afflicted by a pathological joylessness called anhedonia,—a species of melancholy stubbornly resistant to all remedy. As an energetic and somewhat brash youth of nineteen, Xavier Kilgarvan had considered the latter persons ludicrous, and un-Christian, and, indeed, sick: he had joined in the general laughter in the lecture hall when Professor James, in his powerfully modulated voice, had quoted the elderly Goethe on the nature of his long existence: “It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.” Now, in his fortieth year, nearly as famous in his profession as Mr. Pinkerton (and, owing to his integrity, a great deal more respected), Xavier Kilgarvan felt a stab of kinship with the agèd poet; and halfway wondered if anhedonia might not be the most intelligent response to God’s fallen world. “Here, after all, is Hell,” the detective idly mused. “Nor are we likely to be out of it, save through death.”

  The danger of alcoholic intoxication was that it exacerbated the morbidity of this state of mind; its solace, that, with the passage of years, all subtly, it rendered it more palatable. For, save when his brain was afire with ideas, and his workday stretched to as many as eighteen hours uninterrupted, Xavier Kilgarvan was subject to queer fuguelike periods of fatigue and emptiness,—nay, virtual nullity: when he might have compared himself to one of Mr. Kilgarvan’s costly clockwork dolls; or, as he had fallen into the habit of imagining, a mirror of sorts suspended over an abyss, reflecting naught but mists, and vapors, and bodiless shadows in motion,—and, when motion stills, reflecting naught.

  It had gradually impressed itself upon him, that, in the course of his vigorous career, he had seen everything the world had to offer, in its general outline, if not its particulars: there being, as specialists know, a remarkable pattern of correspondences in Crime. For is it not, at bottom, merely Death that seeks entry into Life, by whatever means?�
��merely cruelty and disorder, thrust into calm? While caught up in the febrific excitement of a case, the detective was possessed of a boyish enthusiasm, and had not the leisure to ponder along such lines; but, the case being at last solved, his handsome fee received, and the aftermath of no consequence to him, he found, more and more, that he lapsed into a curious state of lethargy, in which,—ah, how unnaturally!—he did not greatly care what ensued.

  At the time of the Grace Church murders, Xavier Kilgarvan had been involved, by a conservative estimate, in more than two hundred cases, of which some thirty-five are generally deemed major: yet he had never fallen prey to morbid imaginings in the midst of a case, or lost his remarkable energy: for which virtues he had earned an exemplary reputation as being absolutely reliable. Even so, the assertion had begun to haunt him, he knew not from what source, that there is, after all, no innocence in Mankind; but only degrees and refinements of guilt.

  “Consequently, why should one care who kills whom; still less how, or when, or why—!” the troubled man bethought himself.

  At his most pessimistic, Xavier Kilgarvan, oft in disguise, wandered about the streets of Manhattan by night, to see, on all sides, a multitude of guilty persons: murderers whose smiling countenances belied their sins; murderers yet to commit their sins; or, most terrifying of all, murderers who had managed to erase from their memories all knowledge of what they had done. Whether sincere-seeming, or gay, or childlike, or exuberant, or contemplative, or pious; whether dressed in clothes as fashionable and costly as his own, or very modestly,—these persons strolled freely about, “innocent” to all external judgment, yet, withal, oft-times locking their eyes to Xavier Kilgarvan’s, in tacit acknowledgment of their sin. No innocence, do you see!—but only degrees and refinements of guilt: so the melancholy declaration sounded in Xavier’s mind, as he wandered alone betwixt dusk and dawn, scarcely knowing,—or, afterward, remembering—where he went.